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Who should have been nominated for the Eisners’ Best New Series?

The Eisner nominations are taking some criticism for leaving out the Best New Series category this year. The rationale for the decision is that the judges “didn’t find enough contenders that reached the level of quality they were looking for,” but folks like Ron Marz and Phil Hester think they weren’t looking very hard. On Twitter, Marz said, “We are comics; we do NEW better than anyone.” And as Kevin noted earlier today, Hester observed that “you could throw a rock through artists’ alley at SDCC and hit a full slate of worthy Best New Series nominees.”

Even as I’m agreeing with both of those statements, I also love Marz’ suggestion of something positive that we can do. “Nothing stopping the rest of us from recognizing New Series. If you like something, tell everybody about it!”

That’s a great idea and I’ll start by mentioning Daryl Gregory and Carlos Magno’s Planet of the Apes as my own nomination. But please oh please fill up the comments section with your own. What’s the Best New Series you read in 2011?

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Although I haven’t really put that much thought into it, I was mainly reading DC as per the relaunch.I didn’t really find many special new series in 2011 but if I had to pick one I’d probably go with Animal Man. Lemire’s done a fantastic job with it so far giving it just enough of a new slant to make it stand out of its former shadow. In my mind most solid book DC are putting out at the moment (closely followed by Batman) I know they are very popular but there you go.

It does seem like there should have been some considered – especially since DC provided 52 possible nominees. Additionally, the most-nominated series in the Eisner Awards – Mark Waid’s Daredevil – falls under the definition of a new series. Ultimate Comics Spider-Man with Miles Morales would have been a fine choice. I think you can make five decent nominations without even looking beyond Marvel and DC: Animal Man, Swamp Thing, Daredevil, Batwoman, Ultimate Comics Spider-Man. Not to mention the excellent Scott Snyder-Greg Capullo “Batman,” the Grant Morrison “Action Comics,” the Geoff Johns “Aquaman”…
For Image, Who is Jake Ellis and Red Wing would both be worth considering. Last of the Greats also started in 2011. The aforementioned Rachel Rising and Angel and Faith are also books worth reading.

And that’s without even trying Phil Hester’s interesting suggestion of throwing a rock down artists’ alley – there’s all kinds of cool stuff being produced that is looking for a larger audience.

Matt Price: “It does seem like there should have been some considered – especially since DC provided 52 possible nominees.”

Makes me wonder if this could have been the cause of the problem. Instead of arguing whether something like “Green Lantern” is a new series or not, the judges may have simply preferred to temporarily get rid of the “New Series” category. (Sounds far-fetched? Could be, but the explanation given by the judges doesn’t make sense at all.)

Greg

Francis Dawson

Mike Leonard

New actually needs to be NEW, as in never-before-seen. Relaunches, reworkings, and renumberings of existing or previously published material shouldn’t count, and that leaves out the majority of the New 52, as well as Daredevil. Some brilliant work there, easily worthy of an award, just not this specific one. It’s not like they created those books, some of which have characters and concepts over a half-century old, from scratch. The award should be to recognize creators who launched a new ONGOING series – them’s the established rules that haven’t been changed just for this year so they could intentionally do away with the category. Anything that was planned to be published as a limited series, or didn’t have at least two issues published in 2011, is ineligible.

Coming up with even five nominees sticking to that specific, established criteria from what was published in 2011 is difficult. Seems that everyone can come up with one or two, but not a full field of five. So either they bend the rules ‘just this time’ in order to get five nominees – which is a slippery slope, because if you bend the rules this time, why not bend them again for other reasons, which essentially makes the award meaningless if there’s no clearly defined process in choosing the nominees – or you skip it. If they’d have filled the category with New 52 titles then there would be all sorts of backlash against that because of arguments over the exact definition of ‘new’. Skipping it for this round seems the lesser of two evils.

Seems safe to say for next year the language of the criteria will probably be expanded and clarified as to what ‘new’ actually means. That’s something that the folks in charge of nominations need time to debate and not a last minute, off-the-cuff decision as they’re typing up the ballots just so they can hand out an award. I don’t think they meant to slight anyone with the ommission – they’re not telling the creative pool of the industry that “you guys are a bunch of hacks that can’t field anything that’s actually new or worthy” — they’re just trying to protect the integrity of the awards process.

And given the fact that there’s people out there in the crowd shouting out names that wouldn’t belong in there in any case – things that were published in 2012, not 2011 . . .